Phone and Internet access is expected to be restored by Thursday morning across large sections of Northern and Central Arizona, including North Phoenix.

Utility company Centurylink is blaming vandalism for the outage. It’s not known how many customers were affected when a fiber optic line was cut around noon Wednesday.

There were major problems at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. Flower Darby is an Instructional Designer with NAU’s e-Learning Center. She says when the outage started, her office was at a standstill.

"We were relying on Skype for meetings. All of the work we that we do is online in NAU’s learning management system," Darby said. "In fact, I even was trying to give feedback in an online form, a poll, and instead I ended up writing my feedback on a Post-It note and sticking it on a door."

Cristy Zeller works at Haven Montessori School in Flagstaff. She says the outage has been hard on the school.

"Parents have different reasons they want to check in with us during the day. So feeling cut off from parents is concerning to us, and I think it’s a concern to them as well," Zeller said. "And obviously, if there’s an emergency, we would feel concerned about that."

Centurylink said affected customers were still be able to make some local calls, including calls to 911.

It wasn’t just phone calls and Internet access that went down. The outage also left some businesses unable to accept credit cards, and ATMs unable to dispense cash. 

KJZZ's Laurel Morales in Flagstaff contributed to this report.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article has been modified to reflect the outage happened Wednesday and service was expected to be restored Thursday.

Updated 2/25/2015 at 8:47 p.m.